Dismantling the patriarchy…one drink at a time!

MIT breakthrough: A woman president

Famous MIT alumna Shirley Ann Jackson, who is nowthe president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, congratulates President Susan Hockfield on her inauguration

by Barbara West

May 6, 2005 was a milestone for broads in science and engineering.That’s the day Susan Hockfield, a noted neuroscientist, was inauguratedas the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first female president.

Perhaps surprisingly, less has been made of the fact that Dr. Hockfieldis a woman than the fact that she is the first life scientist to leadMIT. When she was named president, the New York Times noted drolly,“there was talk that M.I.T. was breaking new ground. What would itmean, many wondered, if one of the world’s leading citadels of physics,electrical engineering and other hard sciences were led for the firsttime by – a biologist?”

Before coming to MIT, Dr. Hockfield was a professor of neurobiology andprovost of Yale University. Her research focused on the development ofthe brain and on glioma, a deadly kind of brain cancer. Under herleadership, MIT has launched major research initiatives focusing on twoof society’s great challenges: cancer and energy.

Even as she downplayed her gender, Dr. Hockfield was compelled torespond, shortly after her inauguration, to then-Harvard UniversityPresident Lawrence Summers’ suggestion that one reason for the relativescarcity of women at the upper ranks of science might be an innatelesser ability.

“Marie Curie exploded that myth,” Dr. Hockfield and two otheruniversity presidents, Shirley Tilghman of Princeton and John Hennessyof Stanford, wrote in an op-ed piece that appeared in the Boston Globe.But women need “teachers who believe in them,” they went on, and lowexpectations of women “can be as destructive as overt discrimination.”

It should be noted that Dr. Hockfield’s arrival at MIT furthered ashift that started at the Institute in 1999. That’s the year when MITissued a report concluding that women there suffered from widespread ifunintentional discrimination, and it pledged to work toward genderparity. The main force behind that report was MIT biologist NancyHopkins, who literally took a tape measure to her and her femalecolleagues’ lab space to show the MIT administration that the womenwere being allotted fewer resources than their male counterparts. So,to toast the woman who jump-started MIT’s new wave of broads, drink oneof these: